


Corona

by Nemhaine42



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Darcy Lewis is Tony Stark's Daughter, Family, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-23
Updated: 2015-09-06
Packaged: 2018-04-16 20:18:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 12,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4638819
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemhaine42/pseuds/Nemhaine42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Darcy Lewis as Tony Stark's daughter because apparently I can't get enough of this trope [not connected to the Single Steps 'verse].</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Turkey Dinner

 

_2001_

Pepper’s first year of working as Tony’s assistant had a steep learning curve: all the things he was supposed to do, all the things he did regardless. What she could talk him out of - not much - and what she could talk him into - more than she’d thought. Stark had a lot of eccentricities and issues but Pepper generally considered them to be beyond her jurisdiction. She wasn’t there to nanny him, so if he wanted to live his entire life as a frat boy, that was fine.

The name ‘Darcy Lewis’ first cropped up in the spring, when JARVIS’ calendar made mention of her upcoming birthday.  There were no tasks pending for it, nor a reminder alert. It was just there. There weren’t many birthdays in Tony’s calendar, and those that were there were almost always forgotten anyway. There was his parents’, Col Rhodes’, and Obadiah’s birthdays. People who meant something more than business or flattery to Tony. But Pepper hadn’t ever heard of anyone Lewis. Inquiring with JARVIS, Pepper found that Darcy Lewis was a young girl living in Sacramento with her mother and grandparents. She had been in the local paper recently for winning a prize on a school history project, and on her next birthday would turn twelve years old. Oh, and the fact that she was Tony Stark’s illegitimate daughter.

Pepper couldn’t really say she was surprised; she’d dreaded the inevitability that she’d have to help Stark deal with a paternity lawsuit. What startled her was the age of the girl - Tony had been only nineteen when Darcy was born - and the fact that she seemed to be none the worse for her father’s party-hearty lifestyle. In fact, there was very little that connected Darcy Lewis and Tony Stark at all. After discovering this, Pepper made a nuisance of herself by trying to get Tony to acknowledge and admit to her that he had a daughter.  She tried asking about birthdays she should be shopping for, tried questioning him when he told her to keep days free. He gave her odd looks at some of the things she said, but never came out and said it. She, rather cheekily, looked into Tony’s personal finances to see if he had sent something on his own, but no. There were regular child support payments to Darcy’s mother but nothing obvious that would suggest Tony had taken any interest in being part of his kid’s life. Eventually, at the end of a long day and just as she was about to head home, Pepper was forced to be blunt.

“You need to sign your daughter’s birthday card,” she said, sliding a Hallmark card and a pen across the bar towards him.

Tony froze over the drink he was mixing. He raised his eyes to hers slowly, and stared suspiciously at her. Pepper held firm, did not look away, and said nothing. Tony looked from her, down to the card and back again.

“Who told you? Rhodes?”

“JARVIS, actually. It was in your calendar,” Pepper said, trying to remain as pleasant and unthreatening as possible. Like this was just something that happened in every professional relationship, every office was aware of each other’s illegitimate children and it was no big deal.

“Right,” he conceded and took the card, not letting up in the evaluation of Pepper’s motivation. He was still unsure about how to handle this, a little nervous even. He quickly scribbled in the card and sealed it in the envelope, preventing Pepper from reading it, then pushed it back across the bar to her.

“Thank you,” she said, brightly, “was there anything you wanted to buy for her?”

He made an apathetic face, “Honestly, teenage girls are not exactly _my set_ \- for which you should be eternally grateful, by the way - so your guess is as good as mine.”

“Well, what have you gotten her before?”

“Uhh…”

_“The last record for Miss Lewis indicates you transferred two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to her trust fund at the end of the last quarter,”_ JARVIS recited.

“There you go,” Tony shrugged, “What can’t a kid do with another quarter of a million?”

Pepper was appalled. She hadn’t really expected to find that Stark cosied up to his kid every other weekend and braided her hair, but it was as if he knew nothing about her at all and didn’t care to either. She dreaded to think how the poor girl felt about her father, “So… have you ever given her a gift before?”

“Um, the gift of anonymity?” he offered, “financial security? The gift of life? I don’t know.”

“So, no?”

“No,” he said in a clipped tone.

“And you don’t think there’s anything wrong with that?”

“Remind me again how this is your call, Miss Potts? Oh, right, it’s not.”

There was no missing the defensive tone, but it meant the walls were well and truly up. Pepper’s heart sank a little and her shoulders dropped, “Will that be all, Mr Stark?”

“That will be all, Miss Potts.”

She swiped the card from the bar, half tempted to open it to make sure he hadn’t written anything too insensitive, and couldn’t resist adding sardonically, “I’m sure it’ll be fine. If you’ve never sent anything before, she won’t be disappointed. Goodnight Mr Stark.”

Pepper strode out the door and did not see the stricken look on Tony’s face.

She was unable to get Darcy Lewis out of her head all evening. She stared at the peach envelope of Darcy’s card all through dinner. She’d have to post it tomorrow, and it was probably less conspicuous if it went with Pepper’s own personal mail rather than Tony’s. As she sat trying to watch tv, her eyes kept darting over to the card propped up on the sideboard with her fingers tapping on her wine glass. She couldn’t quite articulate why it bothered her so much. Tony made some pretty distasteful choices that she mostly managed to tolerate, but her mind just didn’t want to let this one slide. She’d seen all the newsreels and read all the press about Howard Stark but she knew that, behind closed doors, the relationship between Howard and Tony had not been the best. It gave her a heavy, guilty feeling to think that Tony and Darcy would be just the same, if not worse. Okay, this girl was probably better off for not having to watch her father get drunk and bring home multitudes of women. But did that really mean she should never know Tony at all? Or that Tony should not know her? Despite his glaring flaws, Pepper _liked_ Tony, she knew there was plenty good in him. He was just not good at people. Like an under-socialised cat. Tony didn’t have the first clue how to go about being a good father, she realised. But the onus to fix that was hardly on a twelve-year-old girl, so Pepper was going to take it upon herself to be the go-between.

With a surge of energy, she opened up her laptop, determined that Darcy would receive a birthday gift from her father whether he liked it or not. Tony might have said it was not her business but she was making it her business. Pepper certainly didn’t consider it wrong to disregard Tony’s instructions for the benefit of a child.

Having sent an email full of politely worded total lies, Pepper sat back and took an extra large gulp of wine. She hoped Tony wouldn’t fire her for the audacity, it was sort of what he’d hired her for in the first place.  And she wondered if Darcy would send anything back, a thank you note maybe. A father’s day card was probably wishing for too much. Even just a phone call or an email, to let Tony know he could close the distance. She forced to the back of her mind the thought of Darcy’s mother returning the gift unopened and telling Tony to keep away. It might break her heart, even if not Tony’s.

But the conversation had apparently flipped a switch in Tony’s brain. The next day she found him down in the workshop, without having gone to bed, staring at a bunch of photographs scattered all over the desk. Next to the framed one of Tony and his father there lay a series of school pictures from the last seven years or so, spread in a rough timeline, showing a dark-haired girl go from a gap-toothed kindergartener to a sixth grader starting to shape into a teenager. Darcy had inherited a subtle resemblance to her father; hair, nose, cheekbones. Different eyes, and full, pink lips.

“She looks like you,” Pepper said, gently touching her hand to his shoulder. He peered up at her, sleep-deprived, emotionally drained, and hungover.

“Her mom sent them to me,” he said hoarsely, “Chri…. Kar… Kerry. I never really looked at them much.”

Over Tony’s shoulder she could see a trail of discarded envelopes, leading back to an open drawer where the pictures had been stuffed unceremoniously over the years.

“I probably overstepped the mark,” Pepper admitted, “with what I said yesterday. I’m sorry.”

Tony frowned, “you were right, though. Doing a pretty shit job there, Stark. I figured if I kept my distance, she wouldn’t… history wouldn’t repeat itself. But it does. You said she… she wouldn’t be… _disappointed_ ,” he choked up a little and sniffed it back, “But she will be. It sucks. Every year, hoping this time it’ll be different. And when it’s not, you feel stupid for getting your hopes up,” he swallowed thickly, “I guess we finally found something I don’t know how to fix.”

“Well…” Pepper started, sure she was just as unqualified for this as Tony, “maybe start with little things, um…”

“Like a birthday card?” he asked, a small and bitter laugh escaping him, “Okay, so… you’re a girl, woman, what would a girl want for her twelfth birthday from her deadbeat billionaire father? A pony? Is that too much?”

Pepper coughed awkwardly, “I might have taken the liberty of pulling some strings at Apple. They owed us one for that protective casing alloy… so I tactfully asked that they reciprocate with an advance on one of their new mp3 players. Won’t be out until the fall. I didn’t tell them who it was for.”

Tony looked at her with a smile tugging at his lips, “oh you’re a keeper.”

After that, with Darcy’s card and gift already wending their way to her, Tony seemed to be mostly content to let the whole thing lie. Occasionally, Pepper would catch him with a forlorn expression as he eyeballed the mail she brought in but nothing was ever said. It was several weeks until any of it arose again, with the arrival of a small card. It featured a pair of dogs - puppy and adult pugs - and was written in looping handwriting with flowers over the i’s:

_“Thanks for the iPod, it’s awesome! Happy Father’s Day, from Darcy :)”_

It wasn’t much and Tony tried to downplay how attached he suddenly became to a greetings card, but Pepper saw the way he held on to it for far longer than was necessary, rubbing his thumb across the writing. But it was an enormous step in a really good direction.

“So what next?” Tony asked with a cough, “It has a smiley face, look, Pep. That means I’m in, right? She’s not telling me to go suck a bag of dicks so… do we invite her for Christmas?”

‘I think she’ll want to spend Christmas with her mom, Tony. Why don’t you invite her for the summer?”

“Uh… _all_ summer? Wait, shit, like _this_ summer?” Tony winced.

“Okay, maybe that’s too much, too soon. Especially if you’re not going to cut down the cussing at all,” Pepper conceded, “Thanksgiving? It can only be for a few days. What would you normally do for Thanksgiving?”

“Get drunk and watch tv with Rhodey…”

“Well, then, maybe for a change you don’t do that and have Darcy over. You guys can just hang out and get to know each other a bit. I’m sure Colonel Rhodes won’t mind.”

Pepper whirled around and got on with the rest of her day, making a mental note to find a phone number for Darcy’s mother and set it right in front of Tony so he couldn’t delegate the invitation. He watched her walk away and muttered, “we’re still inviting Rhodey too, right?”

It took some cajoling, and some stern glaring with arms folded, but Pepper did manage to get Tony to call Kerry Lewis and ask his daughter to come out for Thanksgiving. Darcy’s mother had been surprised and uncertain about his motives. There had been a thick silence as Tony listened on the phone, before choking out, “hey, kiddo…”

Tony’s first conversation with his daughter was not long, and not deep. He was visibly nervous, and blurted out his invitation with faux-nonchalance, “so you wanna come hang out with your old man for the holidays?”

He must have been met with a positive response, and he kept up a string of ‘yeah’ and ‘uh-huh’ before assuring Darcy that he would take care of all her travel arrangements. Which naturally meant that Pepper would be taking care of them instead. Tony signed off with an awkward goodbye and hung up, staring at the phone for a long time.

“Well?” Pepper prompted.

“Yeah, we’re a-go,” Tony tapped his fingernails on the counter, still processing the whole thing. He offered nothing else and decided that this new, paternal avenue in life needed more contemplation. In the workshop. He practically barricaded the doors and holed up for hours, only letting Pepper in when she brought up matters strictly not related to Thanksgiving. And the ‘head in the sand’ routine continued for even longer; Tony only talked about his daughter’s visit when Pepper needed practical decisions, like which bedroom she was going to sleep in, dealing with caterers ahead of time. Tony could cook up all sorts of things but dinner was not one of them, and there wasn’t enough money in the world to make Pepper do it.

And Obadiah wasn’t helping. He kept whispering in Tony’s ear about this, that and the other thing that should be kept out of sight of teenagers, like he expected a twelve-year-old girl to execute a corporate takeover or something. Don’t let Darcy into the workshop, it’s dangerous. Don’t let Darcy into the office, there’s sensitive information. Stane even managed to wrangle Tony into an early meeting at Stark Industries, leaving Pepper to take Darcy if she wanted to go Black Friday shopping. Pepper had no clue if Darcy even liked shopping.

Her only real ally in this was Colonel Rhodes. As much as Rhodey could, and often did, go along with Tony’s shenanigans, he was getting a much better handle on this fatherhood deal. Sort of. Vicariously. On Tony’s behalf. He thought it was a great idea, and couldn’t wait to meet Darcy. Rhodey was the one to help Pepper make sure there were at least some age-appropriate movies on offer and impress upon Tony that _B-Movie Horror Night_ was not family entertainment, a phrase which garnered a shudder from Stark.

Around the start of November, Tony also decided he didn’t want to go drive to the airport and collect Darcy for fear of being recognised. Pepper stopped short, since he never usually shied away from the spotlight, but he insisted that it was ‘in Junior’s best interest’ and could Pepper please pick her up instead. Which was how she found herself waiting in a crowded airport on one of the busiest days of the whole year.

“I don’t like this,” Happy muttered, “too many people, too much traffic.”

Pepper remained stubbornly silent, Happy had been grumbling all day about getting through busy airport traffic, and to respond would only encourage him. She knew he had everyone’s best interests at heart but it was also seriously annoying. The plan had been to arrive in the airport only moments before Darcy did, but that was shot down when Darcy’s flight had been delayed. Not by too long but enough that they were still left waiting in arrivals, and Happy was certain someone with a camera would spot them picking up a young girl and make a fuss about it.

A steady stream of bustling people headed out from baggage claim, all frantic and eager to get out of the airport and find their families. Pepper leaned up onto her tip-toes just a bit, suddenly worried Darcy would not see them. As the crowd flowed past them, Pepper caught a glimpse of dark hair and pale skin. And then she laid eyes on Tony Stark’s daughter; a girl who would stand no higher than her father’s chin. She wore braces and thick glasses, and looked much older than twelve. She was peering up, trying to see past all the people in front of her, looking uncertain and walking slower than the rest of the crowd.

Pepper elbowed Happy in the side, he grunted and alertly held up the piece of paper with Darcy’s name on it for her to find. She approached them still at a timid pace, with her eyes darting around them to scan the faces of the other people gathered to collect their loved ones. Her sneakers squeaked on the floor as she came to a stop in front of them, and she gave Pepper a wholly unconvincing smile, “my dad’s not here, is he?”

Darcy was already prepping herself for disappointment and Pepper tried hard not to show she noticed, “No, but he’s waiting for you back at the house. He sent us to pick you up instead. I’m Pepper, and this is Happy, he’s the driver.”

Darcy looked sceptically at Happy, who was hyper-focused and twitchy, and couldn’t seem to help herself from commenting, “are you really, though?”

“I would be if we weren’t about to get snarled up in holiday traffic,” he replied, looking at Pepper instead of Darcy.

But Pepper paid him no mind, determined to be optimistic, “are you ready to go, Darcy? Your dad will be looking forward to seeing you.”

Darcy nodded unenthusiastically and shuffled after Pepper and Happy. She had only brought a backpack as luggage and refused to let Happy carry it for her, which only made him more ansty. They did indeed get caught up in traffic, and Pepper sent Tony a text to let him know. He didn’t respond, so Pepper was forced to either make gentle conversation with Darcy or stay silent for the entire ride. Darcy, for her part, gave perfectly congenial answers but was equally happy to stare out of the tinted windows. She peered down the LA streets and Pepper offered to take her shopping, making sure to phrase it in such a way that did not specifically include or exclude Tony.

Eventually they pulled up into the front driveway. Darcy climbed out of the car without waiting for Happy to open the door, and she spent a good few minutes gawping at the house and its gorgeous setting. The front hall was empty, she could see the tv was on in the sitting area but there was no-one there. There was terse whispering from around a corner and a clunk of a glass on a countertop, then Tony was shoved into view. Pepper saw Rhodey’s quickly retreating arm go back around the corner to the bar. Both Darcy and Tony stood stock still, staring nervously at each other. Tony began fidgeting anxiously with his hands.

“Hey, kid.”

“Hey, Dad.”

Tony smiled with a distinct edge of panic and discomfort, “yup, that’s uh… that’s me. Good flight?”

She shrugged, “it was short.”

Then the pair of them just stood, looking at each other with no idea what came next. Pepper suggested that Tony show his daughter her room, which alleviated none of the discomfort whatsoever. With her backpack set down on the bed Darcy shed her coat, revealing a battered Captain America t-shirt that Tony looked down at with barely concealed contempt. Darcy grew nervous under her father’s staring and folded her arms over her chest.

“So… yeah…” Tony mumbled, averting his gaze to anywhere but his daughter, “how’s things… how’s school?”

“It’s okay. It’s school.”

“Yeah. You get to the bit where they let you set stuff on fire yet?”

“Uh, I don’t know. I’m not really into science. I managed to set the sprinklers off in Home Ec but they gave me detention for that.”

Tony nodded and managed a weak smile, “not a scientist then?”

“Nah. I like history, though. I won a thing last semester.”

“Yeah, I saw that. Good for you.”

It was like watching a car run out of gas and splutter to a halt, and it was agonising. It was just the worst luck that Tony and Darcy would have so little in common. Pepper turned to go back downstairs and father and daughter hastily followed her. At the bottom of the stairs, they found Colonel Rhodes, and Pepper quickly introduced them in the hopes of taking some of the pressure off Tony.

“You can call me Rhodey,” he said, offering his hand to shake, “I help keep Tony outta trouble, most of the time anyway.”

Darcy shook his hand but remained shy and quiet.

“You want a soda? Or something else,” Rhodey asked, and beckoned Darcy to come look behind the bar for something she’d like. Tony followed along behind them, like a puppy with no direction. Or maybe he was hoping to pick up tips from Rhodey, since Darcy seemed to warm to the Colonel far easier than she had to her father. Rhodes spoke to her like an adult, just shooting the breeze with someone new, rather than the awkward, terrified conversations from earlier. Just as Pepper thought Darcy was going to relax, following Rhodey’s friendly lead, Obadiah strode in  from the hallway, full of cheer and giving Darcy the bright and confident treatment usually reserved for investors.

“So, this must be the guest of honor, huh? The little lady settling in alright?” he said, patting Darcy on the back heavily. Darcy looked at him like he’d walked in with a beard full of Christmas lights but Obie took no notice, “Let’s get dinner on the table, shall we?”

**  
**The result was the most awkward Thanksgiving dinner Pepper had ever experienced. Stane was far too genial and treated Darcy like she was a lost Russian princess. Tony was uncommonly quiet from his seat at the head of the table, trying to subtly stare at his daughter and casting acidic looks at her t-shirt. Darcy asked Rhodey some rather piercing questions regarding the invasion of Afghanistan for a middle-schooler. And Pepper drank a lot of wine. Next year they were so getting takeout.


	2. Nothing But Marinara

_2011_

Jane wasn’t really one for pomp or ceremony, so she’d initially tried to politely turn down Darcy’s invite to her graduation. That was something for her parents to attend, not her boss. Okay, it hadn’t exactly been your average internship but still. Thing was, Darcy had gone all sheepish and told her that, between working and caring for her grandparents, Darcy’s mother would be unable to come. She’d known that ever since she’d applied to Culver. She’d invited her father but hadn’t heard either way from him.

From the way Darcy had talked about him before, Jane figured Darcy’s father was kind of a dick. She knew Darcy’s parents weren’t married, never had been, and that Darcy had not had any sort of relationship at all with her father until she’d been twelve.  She’d said they were “cool but not close” and that her father often tended to forget about her. Darcy wanted _someone_ to come to her graduation, so it might as well be her boss. Especially the boss who opened her eyes to a lot of new and exciting stuff, with whom she enjoyed working and spending time.

Jane had been touched by the sentiment and agreed to go, but not without a stream of logical reasons to hide her emotional response. She needed to go back to campus to present a paper on their findings, and sign off on Darcy’s credits. There was a spare ticket for the graduation ceremony, regardless of what Darcy’s father decided, so Jane might as well go. Darcy had smiled knowingly, she’d gotten very good at seeing through Jane’s bluffs.

So they upped sticks and headed back to Virginia, findings at the ready. What they found was a campus crawling in reporters, law enforcement, and military, all picking apart and piecing together facts and stories about the ‘Hulk’ that trashed the front of the main building and most of the lawn opposite. There had been urban legends of a green monster circulating through the university back when Jane had been a student there but now there was video evidence, both here and in Harlem. The two women were not as shocked as they might have been a scant few weeks earlier. It sounded a lot like it would be SHIELD’s department and they wanted as little to do with that organisation as could be helped.

Luckily, Darcy’s place was off-campus and only a short drive away. Tucked away on a quiet, leafy street, where there were one to two worn-looking cars that could only really belong to students, the apartment was on the top floor of a small, relatively new building.  It was surprisingly spacious for an undergrad’s digs, and was obviously empty when Darcy wasn’t there. Something that, in a town with a large student population, did not come cheap. Darcy had mentioned considering renting out the spare room but doubted her own ability to put up with other college students. Suddenly Jane didn’t feel so bad about the unpaid aspect of the internship; there had to be serious money involved here.

While Darcy answered a phone call from her father - who had now remembered that his daughter went to the same university that hosted a serious military operation - Jane nosied around the apartment. She couldn’t tell if the place had come pre-furnished, but there was a fair amount of high-quality furniture, expensive fabrics, and renowned brand electronics. The open-plan kitchen and living room looked very grown-up; the only thing that belied its owner’s age was that instead of framed pictures, there was a corkboard peppered with polaroids and photobooth strips. Lots of friends, plenty of animals. One obviously of her grandparents, but no other family photos. She heard Darcy raise her voice in her bedroom, exasperated and asking if her father had looked at the graduation invite at all.

Jane didn’t know how to help Darcy with her father, Jane and her own father had been very close and she had a similar relationship with Erik. So she had little idea how to even offer Darcy comfort for the clearly rocky father-daughter dynamic, never mind a solution. Not that she thought Darcy would accept it if she did.

Darcy came back with pursed lips and slapped her phone on the kitchen counter, huffing with annoyance, “so, you don’t have to worry about sitting next to my jerkwad father anymore,”

“He’s not coming?”

She sniffed, “He says he can’t find the invite, which means it’s sitting at the bottom of a pile of mail he hasn’t checked in forever, and that there’s stuff he needs to deal with right now, which translates to ‘stuff more important than me.’”

“Ouch. So there’s no-one else who can do that stuff?”

“Oh, he has people. And it’s not as if I’m asking him to come out for the whole damn week. He could just fly down here for a few measly hours and go away again. But no,” Darcy said and screwed up her face to force back tears.

“I’d say ‘let’s get drunk’ but we have heavily censored research findings to present tomorrow,” Darcy shrugged.

“You don’t need to present with me,” Jane reminded her.

“Yeah, well, I’m doing it anyway,” Darcy yanked open a drawer to rifle through, pulling out a selection of take-out menus, “so what do you want? Pizza? Chinese? I have Vietnamese in here somewhere…”

“Darce, are you going to be okay?” Jane asked tentatively.

“I could drive to Taco Bell, if you really want?” Darcy said, determined not to look at her. Jane guessed that was that.

The day of Darcy’s graduation passed swiftly with bustling crowds of parents and well-meaning friends asking what her plans were for the future. Darcy was clearly not in the mood for any of it, still upset at her father. As soon as they got back to her apartment, she kicked off the fancy shoes she’d worn under the gown and quickly changed back into her desert-scuffed boots. There were bottles of wine waiting to be drunk in the kitchen but Darcy insisted they go out for dinner.

_Stanley’s_ was a frequent haunt of Culver students; it was decent Italian food on a reasonable budget, and the old man who ran it couldn’t be happier than to see the place full of young people. Nobody mentioned the fact that everyone constituted young people to Stanley. It was usually busy, and the night after a lot of kids’ graduation was no exception. The restaurant was packed with people celebrating with friends and family. Jane figured it was as good a place as any to say goodbye to Darcy, since that’s what she assumed she’d have to do. Darcy would want a real job, with a real paycheque and Jane doubted she’d been successful in getting more funding to keep her. Jane might be loathe to admit it but, despite Darcy not being her ‘type’, they’d gotten used to each other and found a good and steady rhythm to work in. Darcy had picked up the processes Jane worked in quicker than expected and Jane knew she would feel a little lonely when she went back to working on her own. So it came as a great surprise when Darcy told her she was giving up her apartment, so they could stay in New Mexico longer term or travel far and wide, wherever their research took them.

“What?! That place is swanky as hell and you want to give it up to live in a trailer in the desert with me?” Jane asked in disbelief.

“Yeah… I mean, I don’t need to be based here now. And a trailer - even a nice one - has got to be way cheaper than the rent on that place.”

“I don’t want to know what the rent is, or how you’re paying it,” Jane said, “Darcy, you know I can’t pay you, right?”

“I know. That’s okay. That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about…” she trailed off, fidgeting with her napkin, “I have money. Like, plenty. My dad put tonnes of it away in a trust fund while I was growing up so I could go to college, but then he just paid everything off in one fell swoop. He…”

“He pays for stuff so he gets away with not coming to your graduation or anything,” Jane said, blatantly not phrasing it as a question. The more she learned about Darcy’s father, the less she liked him.

“I guess he feels guilty sometimes. But what I mean is that all that money can go on the research. Or the equipment. Or getting us where we need to be. I want to use it for something worthwhile.”

“It’s your money, Darce, I can’t ask you to do that.”

“You’re not asking, I’m offering,” Darcy said with increasing firmness, “Besides, do you want to get an Einstein-Rosenkranz thing running-”

“Einstein-Rosen Bridge.”

“Whatever,” Darcy waved away her interruption, “Or do you want it to be buried in some government archive facility? ‘Cause that sounds like a total waste of a PhD to me.”

In any other circumstance, Jane would be all up for a fresh glut of funding as well as sticking it to SHIELD. Their paper had indeed been severely edited and blacked out, which might earn her bonus conspiracy points but would not likely result in any financial support. She still felt a little guilty taking Darcy’s money though. Jane herself still had student loans to pay off, but if Darcy’s father had already paid for hers and this is what Darcy truly wanted… well.

“Cards on the table, how much money are we talking about here?” Jane pried. She had no intention of using all of it, just seeing what could reasonably be bought while still leaving Darcy money to live off.

Darcy coughed awkwardly and mumbled, “There’s like six and a half million dollars.”

_“WHAT?!”_ Jane blurted, then quickly slapped her hands over her mouth. A few people around them turned to look, though the majority of the restaurant was lost in the busy racket. Their waitress came across to check on them. The two women smiled awkwardly and ordered their food. Once the coast was clear, Jane immediately leaned across the table towards Darcy.

_“Six and a half million?!”_ she asked in a harsh whisper.

“Shh!”

“That’s a shit-tonne of money. What does your dad even do?”

Darcy chewed her lip nervously and looked around her to see if the waitress or anyone else was listening, “He’s…  you wouldn’t believe me if I told you… ”  
  


“After what just happened to us in that desert? I think I’ll believe anything.”

“Let’s just say he’s an engineer… a self-employed engineer, with military connections that I probably shouldn’t even be talking about.”

Jane sat back in her chair and scrambled about in her brain for a concrete thought. That was so much money, options and alternatives that she’d previously written off as too expensive were now firmly within reach. They could do almost anything. They could go anywhere. She wanted to put together something to convey to Darcy how grateful she was, but all that came out of Jane’s mouth was, “we could buy a satellite dish. A new one. A big one.”

Darcy smiled at that and steered the conversation away from her father and towards all the things they could do, the places they could go, with what she adamantly referred to as _their_ money. If they were careful, it could last for years. It wasn’t a position Jane was used to being in, and the question of how Darcy’s father came by his funds niggled away in her mind. Either Darcy didn’t know, which was worrying, or she did and it was something shady, which was worse. Jane kept quiet about it all through dinner, rather more committed to the ‘yes let’s spend this money, however ill-gotten’ sentiment than the ‘looking a gift horse in the mouth’ one.

She managed until they were back at the apartment, when Darcy’s phone lit up with a message from her father offering some vacation or other as recompense for his no-show. Darcy firmly turned it down and shoved her phone underneath a couch cushion, before evaluating several bottles of wine for consumption with a scowl.

“Hasn’t your mom tried to talk to him?” Jane asked.

Darcy snorted at the idea, “yeah, right. Mom talks to him less than I do. She says I shouldn’t get my hopes up, that he’ll always be the same. ‘Leopards don’t change their spots, Darce,’ even after near-death experiences.”

“Near-death experiences??”

“It… there was a thing,” Darcy said, gesturing vaguely in an attempt to find something succinct to say. She did not find anything but gave Jane a long, appraising look and sighed deeply, “my Dad is Tony Stark.”

That, Jane had not been expecting.

And, okay, she wasn’t sure she’d have believed it if Darcy had told her when they first met. But the apartment, the free ride to college, the multi-million dollar trust fund, they made much more sense with Tony Stark behind the wheel. And it certainly explained Darcy’s odd habit of watching Stark’s appearances on tv and online and tutting at them. She stared back at her intern. Eventually Darcy started some sort of explanation, reaffirming her parents’ lack of relationship beyond Darcy’s existence, that she and her father did not have all that much in common and, even with the best of intentions, saw little of each other. But Jane was only half listening; instead her eyes were darting around, looking closely at all of Darcy’s features and trying to spot a resemblance. This was _Tony Stark’s_ daughter, the man who revolutionised military technology and now flew around in a suit of armour. If Darcy took after her father in even the most tentative fashion…

“Are you gonna say anything, Jane?” Darcy asked, a little concerned.

Jane opened her mouth to start several different sentences, before blurting out, “so is Political Science just you rebelling or something?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, did you choose politics because you knew your dad wouldn’t like it? I totally understand but that’s no reason to throw away your intelligence. If you can do even moderately complex equations, the research can go so much quicker -”

“I can’t,” Darcy interrupted, “Maybe if I could, I’d get to see my dad more than once a year. I _like_ politics. I’m good at it. Yeah, my dad turned his nose up at it. I’m sure he’d much rather I was good at math, or physics or whatever. But I’m not, I just pulled the wrong batch of brain-genes, okay?”

That was probably a cue to leave it alone, but it just seemed so surreal. One did not just happen to be related to a superhero and be blasé about it, never mind expect someone to not be curious about it.

“So what do you call him? Do you call him Tony?”

“No, I call him Dad. Or Daddy, if I screw something up.”

“But wasn’t it weird for you? To watch your dad go from being some playboy billionaire - no offense - to flying around as a… a superhero?”

“I don’t know, I guess so.”

“Have you seen the suit up close? How does it work?”

“I don’t know, Jane!” Darcy yelled, slamming her hands on the counter, “I only ever see him on Thanksgiving, for which he is usually either in his workshop or drunk off his ass. And for years I had to live with that - it was drunk dad or no dad. But now, he’s Iron Man! And I was like ‘wow that might actually be _more_ self-destructive than the drinking’ but he was so weird about it. ‘Aww baby girl, we’re not gonna build weapons anymore, come talk to me about green energy and all your other liberal agenda stuff’ and then he goes and pays off my whole college tuition. And I thought it was all going to be different, that we would actually be… I don’t know, but apparently it doesn’t change a damn thing: I’m still a once-a-year obligation that doesn’t need to be bothered with any other time.”

Jane stood stock still, surprised by the outburst. Angry tears sprung from Darcy’s eyes and she roughly grabbed the nearest bottle of wine from the counter and opened it, sniffing away her tears.

“Oh, the family vices: science and alcohol,” she said bitterly, pouring a large glass.

“You know Political Science isn’t actually a science, right?”

Darcy glared at her over her wine and Jane peeped out a small ‘sorry.’

***

“You’re aware that Agent Coulson was recently reassigned to New Mexico,” Fury said, flatly not a question. He sat down opposite Tony at the little table and looked at him over the top of a manila folder, “The Land of Enchantment.”

“What’d she do?”

Fury did not reply and just gave Stark an unreadable stare.

“Come on, I just wrote my name on the periodic table, you gotta give me more credit than that. Your ‘problem in the south-west,’ where my kid has just finished an internship? What did Darcy do? How’d you even know about her anyway, I kept that pretty under-wraps.”

“I had one of my best agents be your assistant for a week. I know more about you than I ever wanted to. But as far as we can tell, Darcy Lewis was involved in ‘grazing’ a man with a moving vehicle, tasering that man and then forging identification to get him out of SHIELD’s custody.”

Tony put his hand to his heart and tried to keep his face as serious as he could and said, “I’m so proud,” but Fury seemed neither impressed or even surprised.

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Thanksgiving.”

Fury raised an eyebrow, “A regular family guy, aren’t you? When was the last time you _talked_ to her?”

“Last night.”

“About what?”

“She’s pissed because I’m missing her graduation. Although I was kind of busy dying to remember about the invite… not that I told her that. How exactly am I implicated in vehicular assault and fake IDs?”

“What do you know about Dr Jane Foster?”

“Uh… nothing. Who is she?”

“Dr Foster is the woman currently employing your daughter as intern, Stark, forgive me if I don’t believe you. Think harder.”

Stark huffed, “Darcy’s a Poli Sci major. She was on an astrophysics internship since she couldn’t meet her science requirements to graduate. She applied to a whole bunch, I don’t know why that one. Honestly, I gave the whole thing to Pepper to handle. How hard can it be to meet science requirements for a subject that’s not science?”

Fury gave a grumbling sigh and cut to the chase, “Stark, did you in any way fund or support Dr Foster’s research?”

“In the macro sense of paying for my kid to go to college?”

“How about in the micro sense? Even if all you did was sign a god-damned cheque?”

“No.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Yes. I barely know my own daughter, never mind the woman she’s working for. Is that what you want to hear? Why is SHIELD interested in an astrophysicist and an intern anyway, even if they did mow down a pedestrian? That doesn’t sound like your division.”

Fury said nothing but fixed him with a stern glare, before standing from the table, “I’m going to go make a phone call, one explaining that the only connection between you and Foster is a coincidence. Just biology. Are we _absolutely_ sure that that’s the case?”

“Yes,” Tony bit out.

“Okay,” Fury said, coolly, “You stay there, we have some other topics to discuss when I get back.”

Fury turned and walked towards the door, pulling a phone from his pocket, “Agent Barton, I’ve got good news for you.” He left on the table in front of Tony, another brown folder. One that read ‘Avengers Initiative.’


	3. Banana Pancakes

_2014_

It was night in the desert and the clinging darkness that made it perfect for astrophysicists also made it terrible for the driver. Their headlights lit up the larger rocks and potholes in front of them but failed to illuminate much else, as they headed down a dirt track. And the further from the beaten trail they went, the worse it got. The road was covered in thick patches of sand that Darcy was struggling to navigate, and several times the van squirmed as the tyres struggled to find traction. Eventually they left the road altogether, driving straight through the desert. The coordinates Jane had wanted to visit that night were taking them way out into bumpy terrain much further from town.

“Jane, are we close yet? I don’t really want to have to replace the sump guard on this thing again.”

“A little further,” Jane said, not looking up from her GPS.

Darcy huffed and reached down into her pocket, feeling blindly while steering one-handed. She pulled her iPod from her jacket and plugged it into the radio, keeping one eye on the stereo and another on the road. Eventually, upbeat saccharine pop music bleated out from the speakers and made Jane screw up her face.

“Darcy turn that off, you’ll interfere with the receptors. It took hours to calibrate them,” she complained.

“Nope,” Darcy replied, bopping her head to the cheesy tune, “it’s the iPod, not the radio, it’s fine.”

“Well, I’m not listening to that, it was awful in the ‘90s and it’s awful now.”

“Nuh-uh. Remember the rules, Jane. Driver picks the music, shotgun shuts her cakehole.”

Jane pursed her lips and reached out to the iPod to change the track herself, Darcy let out a squawk of indignation and started pushing the back button whenever Jane pushed the forward one.  Back and forth they went, starting to squabble and paying less attention to the path ahead.

“Watch the hardware, Janey. There’s already plenty scratches on it.”

Darcy tried to grab the iPod from where it sat on the dashboard, only to knock it down, leaving it dangling from its connection cable.

“Just turn it off,” Jane snapped.

“Ladies, please,” Thor called uselessly from the back.

The van hit a particularly large rock and bounced around, and Darcy had to steer sharply to correct them. But they were too close to the edge of a ditch, which was made mostly of sand and disintegrating rocks. There were shouts and shrieks as the van lurched sideways, the wheel felt like it was connected to jelly as Darcy turned it. The front corner dipped suddenly and hit something hard, bringing the vehicle to a rough, jarring stop. The engine stalled to nothing but a hissing of steam, and there were groans from the jostled passengers.

Darcy felt a stinging where her seat belt bit into the skin by her collarbone, her arms shook a little and she reluctantly prised her hands from the wheel. Jane was in much the same shaken state, unsteady but unharmed. Thor, naturally, had not a hair out of place.

“Everyone alright?” he asked, unbuckling and peering forward between the front seats. Both women nodded, taking deep breaths. The van’s stereo still sang cheerfully, and Jane yanked the connection cable out with finality.

“Shit,” Jane breathed.

“At least we didn’t hit anyone this time,” said Darcy.

Thor passed her a flashlight from the back. The van door opened with a heavy swing and she hopped out to inspect the damage. There was a significantly large boulder jammed into the front of the van’s grille, and had probably done plenty internal damage. And the front left tyre was ripped and shredded. They had a spare in the back but that wasn’t going to get them on the road any time soon.  Thor managed to pull the Pinz free from the ditch, something which in any other circumstance Darcy would have taken great pleasure in watching. For science, obviously. But both she and Jane stood in the dark, empty desert, taking deep breaths. They were well beyond the reach of any lights from town, or even car headlights from the road.

Of course, since it was the middle of the night and they were stuck a good ways off the beaten track, none of the towing people that even picked up would come all the way out there for them. After the last name in their fairly out-of-date, tattered phonebook failed to pick up, Darcy threw her phone back on to the car seat with a frustrated grunt. It was really hard to hang up angrily on a touchscreen.

Jane bit her lip and looked down at the mangled grille, “you could, um, call your dad maybe?”

Darcy stood in tense silence before she sighed, “What’s he going to do about it? Apart from nag at me for crashing in a desert with no-one for miles?”

“I mean if he called the tow place instead, maybe they’d be more likely to come out here. Throw his name at them, or his money. Either way.”

Jane was probably right, Darcy thought, although Pepper would probably be much more help than her father. He’d probably get her to call in his place and offer a good incentive for driving out to the middle of nowhere to rescue some stranded idiots. She very much doubted Tony would mention that his daughter was one of them, she did not think he ever mentioned her at all. She was pretty sure Thor remained unaware of her relation to his teammate and she wasn’t about to bring it up. But it was really cold out here and the Pinz was busted so, yeah, Jane was probably right.

Grabbing her phone back from the seat of the van, Darcy climbed back up to the boulder which was the only decent vantage point where there was even patchy signal. After scrambling up the side, she shivered in the cold, and scrolled through her contacts for ‘Dad.’ The phone rang, the tone hazy through the static, and Darcy was filled with dread that he would not pick up. But just as she was wondering whether it would do any good to cry into his voicemail, her father’s sleepy voice answered.

“Hi, Daddy, so… don’t freak out, okay?” she started, “but Jane and I might have gotten into a teensy weensy bit of a car crash. We’re totally fine though!”

***

The common room in the tower was quiet that night, just Tony, Pepper and Steve. And it was late, so all of them were winding down; Steve read, Pepper looked very serious as she tapped away at her tablet, and Tony was already half asleep with his head in Pepper’s lap. It was a warm and cosy evening atmosphere, that was jarringly interrupted by the loud ringing of Tony’s cell phone.

Tony grumbled and made only the barest effort to reach for the phone vibrating angrily on the coffee table. When he couldn’t reach, he pouted up at Pepper, “you answer it.”

“No, you answer it. I’m almost at a new highscore,” she replied, glancing only briefly at the phone, “besides, it’s Darcy, you should definitely answer it.”

Tony looked puzzled and stretched over to grab the phone, checking that the caller ID did in fact read ‘Darcy L.’, before holding the phone to his ear, “hey kiddo, what’s up?”

There were a few beats as Tony listened, and Steve looked up from his book. He did not know who Darcy was but out of all the possible options for who could be calling Tony Stark this late at night, none of them really ought to have the name ‘kiddo.’

_“What?!”_ Tony exclaimed, sitting bolt upright, “What happened? Are you hurt?

Both Pepper and Steve suddenly became very alert, ready to spring into any necessary action, and watched as Tony got up from the couch and started pacing nervously.

“Are you sure? Double sure? Because if you need to go to the hospital, don’t worry about it, just go and I’ll cover you.”

“I am not panicking. No, I am… okay maybe, a little bit, yes. Yes, I am panicking, but it’s gonna be alright… are you _sure_ you don’t need a doctor? You sound jittery.”

“Right. Okay. Mechanic, sure. I can do that. Where are you?”

Tony spluttered, “ _forty miles?!_ What the hell are you doing forty miles into the desert?”

“Oh, seventy to Roswell, yeah, that makes me feel so much better. Okay, just… stay where you are, keep warm and… and… I’ll make it all better, I’ve got this, Daddy’s gonna come get you and it’ll all be fine. Okay? Okay,” he hung up reluctantly and grasped his phone in his hand tightly enough to make the plastic creak. He saw Steve’s eyebrows practically hit his hairline, and Tony realised that he’d never mentioned Darcy at all to his fellow Avengers, and now he’d just referred to himself as _Daddy_.  It was a title he probably didn’t merit, and it could easily be misinterpreted by the filthy-minded which, judging by the look on Steve’s face, it was.

“JARVIS, you trace that call signal?”

_“I did indeed, sir. I am uploading Miss Lewis’ coordinates now,”_ JARVIS responded.

“Tony, what happened?” asked Pepper anxiously. Tony was pacing and fidgeting, eyes wide with panic. JARVIS’ lit up a screen with a map, zooming into a spot in New Mexico surrounded by nothing but desert.

“Car crash,” Tony had to take a deep breath, looking like he wanted to throw up, “She says she’s okay but none of the local places will come out to them because they decided they needed to be forty goddamned miles into the desert. So… so… a plan, a plan. The plan is…”

“Tony, calm down. Remember to breath,” Pepper consoled in a firm but soothing voice, “the plan is that we’ll send out a plane - one that can land on rough terrain -  to go get her. Happy’s still in LA, we’ll call him, see if he can fly out too. And Darcy can go back to the house. Okay?”

“Okay,” Tony said, finally getting a grip on his breathing, “you call Happy. Get the plane going. I’m… I’m gonna…”

“You’re going to stay here and try to stay calm, I’ll tell Happy to call us when she’s home,” Pepper said. There was a beat, a second, where Tony’s eyes met Pepper’s and they both knew Tony was going to do no such thing.

“Right. JARVIS? Send those coordinates to the suit asap, I wanna be off the ground in five.”

__

_“Right away, sir.”_

As Tony strode through to the lab - shouting instructions to JARVIS about flight plans - Pepper gave a heavy sigh and swore gently under her breath. Steve turned to her, still somewhat unsure if he was needed for this or not, “I didn’t know you guys had a daughter…”

“Oh, she’s Tony’s daughter, not mine. I’ve met her, she’s nice, she’s…”

“Is she anything like Tony?”

“She’s… like an alternate universe version of Tony. I don’t know, you’ll see,” Pepper said with a shrug, and dug out her phone.

***

Darcy shivered in an itchy plaid blanket, alternately looking out the window into the dark and checking her phone for non-existent messages. Pepper had sent a text telling her a plane would come out for them, but that was a while ago. Of course, there was no cell coverage apart from that one spot on top of the boulder but Darcy wasn’t about to climb out of the van to stand there. She pulled the blanket tighter around her, clenching her jaw shut to stop her teeth chattering.

“What time did you say the plane was coming,” Jane asked, miserably. Which Darcy thought was rich coming from the person snuggled into Thor’s chest and not wrapped in mouldy-smelling car blanket.

“Another hour or so.”

It really was beautiful out under the sky, the space above them packed with stars and the occasional satellite or plane. The Milky way arched around the heavens, reminding them of just how small they all were. In amongst the twinkling stars and planets, there was a light, clearly man-made, moving towards them at high speed. It was not a plane - it lacked the blinking wingtips lights - and was accompanied by a much louder engine whine than every other jet that had flown overhead. Darcy was sure Pepper had said an actual plane would be coming for them, so what was that flying in? She dug out a pair of dusty binoculars from the van and stepped outside to get a better look. Thor and Jane followed suit, bringing the large flashlight as a beacon as whatever-it-was got closer and closer.

“Wow, that’s a really low-flying plane,” Jane said, “is that us?”

Darcy focused up the binoculars and peered through; her heart froze at the sight of incoming repulsor jets, “oh, no, Dad, you didn’t.”

The roar of engines became deafening and, with a flash of light and a dramatic thunk, Iron Man landed a few feet in front of them.

“Oh my god,” Darcy groaned, hiding herself behind the Pinz. She heard Thor call out to her father, surprised and a little confused, but Tony completely ignored him. He flipped up the faceplate and jetted over to her, wrapping his arms around her and squeezing her to his chest.

“Woah, what the hell? This really doesn’t work when you’re in the suit!” she gasped. He released her and she dropped back down to her feet and wheezed in some air. Stark looked her up and down and, finding her unharmed, his pale and panicked face started to subside. He looked around, perplexed, as if only just noticing he wasn’t in the tower anymore. He hissed at the sight of their van.

“Are you okay, kiddo? Seriously?”

“I’m fine, relax,” Darcy shuffled her boots in the dirt, “if I’m honest, I was expecting something bigger. Unless you’re going to fix it up and we _drive_ to LA.”

“Yeah, no, Pep’s on that. There’s a plane coming out to some airfield or other that we might have to trespass on, but…”

“Stark?” Thor asked, “I am glad to see you but how did you know to come?”

“Uh… she called me,” he pointed to Darcy, “And what are _you_ doing here?”

“I… she called you?” his eyes widened, “Darcy, _this one_ is your father??” Thor exclaimed, voice rising with surprise. He looked around to Jane, only to find her watching their interactions with a complete lack of surprise. Tony, true to form, was quickly putting two and two together.

“Wait, _he’s_ the guy you ran over? With this thing, that couldn’t handle a boulder? No wonder Fury gave me the Spanish Inquisition... so Thor’s Jane and Darcy’s Jane are the same Jane. How come you didn’t tell him, or me?” Tony quizzed.

“Well, I signed about a thousand scary forms promising I wouldn’t tell you. And I met him before you did. Back then, he had no idea who you were, and he probably wouldn’t have cared. Although, hey, that would have clued us in to him being from outer space, if he didn’t know who the great Tony Stark was.”

“Ouch.”

“And where do you get off, asking me that? How come _you_ didn’t tell him about _me_?”

“Uh, we were kinda busy saving the world. We didn’t exactly have sharing time when we held hands and told each other all about our secret kids. His family drama was enough to deal with,” Tony snapped, thumbing back towards Thor.

Darcy huffed, she turned away from her father and towards the beaten up van that had brought all of them out here, “so can you fix the van or not?” she demanded in a thick voice.

Tony could, indeed, get the van at least running again. Enough to get them chugging along through the desert towards an airfield that belonged to a gas company. Her father had thumped and cursed at the gaping hole in their van, alternately demanding that Darcy pass him various tools or materials. Both she and Tony got snappish and antsy when he started asking for things Darcy didn’t understand the name of, until Jane swapped in as assistant instead. Darcy noted dejectedly that Jane and Tony progressed much faster than she had with her father. But here they were, nursing the van along rough terrain to go trespassing on a dirt airstrip. Tony flew ahead of them in the suit leading the way, for which Darcy was grateful since it meant the van wasn’t weighed down by the suit, nor did she have to face talking to her father for just that bit longer. She didn’t really want to talk to anybody. Thor tried a few tentative questions, but was shot down almost immediately and got the hint to just sit in the back quietly. Darcy was annoyed and tired and just wanted to stop.

They trundled along dirt paths, at a sedate pace which no-one questioned, until they arrived at some sort of small gas processing site. They were met with the welcome sight of a US Air Force cargo plane waiting for them off to one side. There were no security guards or fences, just tracks where small aircraft came and went, and a sign reading ‘Roxxon.’ The security of the place obviously hinged on it being too far out into the desert for anyone to notice or care about. Darcy parked the van, lining it up with the plane’s loading ramp, and the engine reduced itself to a hiss and a knocking noise that she didn’t like the sound of. She wasn’t altogether sure the van would start itself again but Darcy was past the point of caring. If Thor could haul the van out of a ditch, he could push it up a ramp.

Waiting inside the plane was Colonel Rhodes, as well as an entirely too green-looking airman who skittered around trying to avoid eye contact with either Thor or Iron Man. They were all quickly and efficiently strapped in and on their way. Rhodey kept her father occupied - informing Stark that Air Traffic Control was definitely pissed at him - and Darcy had to resolutely look away from Thor, who was staring alternately at her and her father, determined to spot the similarities.

The van was offloaded into a storage hangar at the airport, until they could arrange a more permanent repair job. Thor pushed it backwards into a space between two smaller Stark Industries jets, while Jane fretted and triple-checked her equipment. She told whoever looked at her too long that the van itself and some of its built-in systems don’t do well in storage. Everything would need cleaned, and recalibrated if it was stored incorrectly and left too long.

“We had to clean out a million spider webs after we got back from London, it set us back a whole week,” Jane moaned.

“London?” Tony queried, rounding on Darcy, “You mean all that shit being blown up? Alien invasion number two? _You were in that?!”_

“Yeah,” Darcy admitted softly, “I’m still fine. I’m sure someone would have told you if I’d gotten my leg shredded or something.”

“Oh, that’s just great. What else don’t I know, huh? Are you working for SHIELD? Are you Captain America’s bit on the side?”

“‘Bit on the side’? Dad, stop being ridiculous.”

Happy chose that moment to swing a Bentley around to them, distracting Tony from his delirious anxiety over what Darcy was and was not telling him. Happy fussed over her a little too, but was easily assuaged and focused on getting everyone into the car. The Iron Man suit was too heavy to go for jaunts in a luxury car, however, and Tony jetted off ahead. Darcy sighed in the momentary relief, more used to her father being distant and uninterested rather than this new intensely-concerned behaviour. She knew that, yes, it was an unspoken, long-held desire to be closer to her father, to have him look out for her like fathers ought to. But this was the deep end.

“You okay?” Rhodey asked.  Darcy told him, for what felt like the thousandth time, that she was fine and pleaded with him to accompany them back to the house.

“Sorry, short-stack, I gotta put this thing back where I found it. We’re calling it a training exercise,” he said, gesturing to the cargo plane, “Just give him some time to calm down, don’t take everything he says to heart.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said despondently. She promised to send him, and Pepper, a text when she was home safe and was swiftly bundled into the back of the car.

Jane perked up as they drove through LA, late though it was. Neither she nor Thor had ever been to this city and Darcy was strong-armed into spending some time exploring over the next few days. It would take a while for the van to be fixed up and ready to go, and Darcy wanted that time to go by as quickly as possible. Oh, it was good to see Rhodey, and Happy, and, yeah, her dad. But there was a huge sense of dissonance as two previously unconnected parts of her life were smushed together.

And it only worsened when they arrived at the house, as Thor found that the login he used in the tower worked out here too. JARVIS greeting him, calm and collected, and Jane peered into the holographic interface as Thor tapped in a message back to New York, letting Pepper know they’d arrived. Tony came up from the workshop, wearing comfortable clothes which - judging by the creases and grease marks - he’d flown around in the suit in.

“Is it true you have a miniature particle accelerator here?” Jane asked, with excited curiosity lighting up her face. Darcy had seen the same expression back when she’d first told Jane she was related to Tony Stark in the first place. It had been annoying then but now it gave Darcy a sinking feeling she was about to be abandoned. With Iron Man standing right there in front of them, there was little Darcy could do to prevent Jane or Tony getting distracted by each other.

“Technically I dismantled it, but yeah,” Tony answered.

“And you used it to synthesize an entirely new element that powers the arc reactor? That stuff is revolutionary. This girl I knew back at Culver wrote an article about how it’s a huge game-changer for renewable energy.”

“Yup. I figured if it was good enough for the ol’ ticker,” he rapped his knuckles off his chest, “it was good enough for clean energy. I still have the schematics downstairs, I built a virtual simulator… if you want to give it a whirl?”

Jane looked fit to burst at the thought, clearly trying to temper down her excitement.

“It has a 3D interface…” Tony tempted, walking backwards towards the staircase.

Darcy watched as Jane disappeared after Tony down into the shop, both of them chattering away animatedly. She heard the secure door slide shut and a bleep from JARVIS’ system, letting her know they were well and truly ensconced in the workshop. A place it had taken years of good behaviour and multiple promises not to fiddle with anything for Darcy to be allowed into. Standing there in the silent living room, she felt incredibly lonely even with Thor next to her. This was a house she had visited about a dozen times over the years, but every single time the place looked different. Either it was new furniture, a new AI interface, or more recently new Iron Man suits making her feel out of place all over again. And, where before she’d had Pepper or Rhodey to keep her company, now she was left on her own.

“You want a drink, big guy?” she asked Thor, grateful that at least the bar hadn’t changed. She dug out one of the frozen glasses and poured a beer for Thor and opened a bottle of wine for herself. She carefully avoided looking at how expensive it was. Thor waited a few beats before looking at her with a sad, knowing expression.

“Do you quarrel with your father often?” he questioned softly. It was then that Darcy realised that, out of all her friends, Thor was in a better position to understand her feelings than most. And she felt a little guilty for not telling him before, it hardly ever came up and, honestly, she would admit to enjoying the parts of her life that did not have her father inadvertently hanging over them.  

“I guess so. We don’t really see much of each other,” she answered, “I mean, you heard him. I’m a ‘secret.’ And probably not a good one.”

“Sometimes our elders do things with good intentions that have consequences that even the most enlightened cannot foresee.”

“I know,” she said into her wine, “I get it. Weapons development and alcoholism aren’t really kid-friendly. He probably did me a favour, letting me grow up with Mom and my grandparents but… ever since the whole,” she held her hand up to where the large hole would be in her father’s chest, “thing… it’s like everything got a fresh start. Except me. It doesn’t matter what I do, I’m not right, I’m not included.”

Thor gulped the last of his beer, “I do not know if I am grateful you never met my brother. He had many of the same feelings, and truth be told I still cannot offer much comfort for them.”

“Me and Loke-ster could have ruled the world,”

“Not if you called him that,” Thor laughed.

They fed themselves on sandwiches made with leftovers in the fridge and Darcy made extra to leave for her father or Jane, if they ever decided to surface for air. Pepper called, at what must have truly been an ungodly hour for her, seeking reassurance that everyone was safe and sound. Darcy gave up waiting for either Jane or Tony to appear and made sure there was a guest room set up for her boss and Thor before heading to her own bedroom. It was just as she’d left it, exactly as she’d left it. Even down to the sweater she’d accidentally left behind last year, draped over the back of the chair. The floor and windows were clean, her room clearly being included in some cleaning schedule - whether by person or robot -  but there was a thin layer of dust on the desk and the artwork on the wall. The bed looked neat enough though, with a set of bed sheets she’d never seen before, so she threw herself down on them and buried her face into the pillow.

It only felt like a few breaths before Darcy jumped awake when JARVIS chirped at her.

_“Good morning, Miss Lewis. It is 7:47am, weather today is projected to be in the low 80s with a 30 percent chance of precipitation. You have one new message from Ms Potts, and Mr Stark has asked me to inform you your breakfast is almost ready.”_

It took Darcy a good few moments to process any of JARVIS’ information, she winced at the tight stiffness in her shoulder that reminded her that she had in fact been in a car crash the night before. It was not Thanksgiving, despite the fact that she was only ever in this house on Thanksgiving. It was sunny, but not in the dusty and baking kind of way she’d gotten used to in New Mexico. And, _god_ , it was too early.  Astrophysics assistants only did morning in the ‘2am’ kind of way, and she wanted to just roll back into her bed. But there had been mention of breakfast and for once she wasn’t going to have to make it herself. She slowly slid out of bed feet first and stood, patting her hair into a vague sense of order and pawing the bedside table for her glasses.

“Shall I display your message, Miss Lewis?” JARVIS asked.

“Uh, yeah… okay,” Darcy dearly hoped it was neither long nor complicated. Pepper’s message was that she was taking the earliest possible flight out and to expect her sharp. Darcy simply could not fathom the motivation to get dressed, and shuffled, bleary-eyed, through from her bedroom to the staircase. She could hear Thor still snoring from the guest bed, and if Jane had gone to bed there was no way she’d be getting out of it now. Downstairs, Darcy padded through to the kitchen, which was filled with light smoke and the smell of burning, and her father waving a fish slice dramatically at a frying pan.

“Dad?”

“Oh! Hey, Darcy-girl. Uh, I was gonna make you pancakes - you like pancakes, right? - and it went really well so… I got JARVIS to get you up. But then, uh, it went really badly and well…”

The smoke detector went off, beeping wildly.

Darcy strode up to the stove, taking the frying pan away from her father and dumping it into the sink. A run of cold water made a hiss of steam and she stood watching the last pieces of burned and congealed pancake batter wash off and into the drain.

“JARVIS, kill the alarm. Ventilation, please,” Tony ordered. An overhead fan whizzed into life, clearing the smoke. Darcy noticed there was a plate with less-burnt pancakes sitting waiting for her on the countertop next to a bowl of banana slices and a weird-looking smoothie.

“I don’t like bananas, Dad,” Darcy complained, sure in the knowledge that he had not remembered. It had taken him ten years to commit Pepper’s strawberry allergy to memory, Darcy didn’t have a hope in hell.

“Uh, that’s for me,” he said hastily, sliding the bowl away from her pancakes. On second thoughts, he moved the smoothie over as well, “this too.”

Darcy stared at her now lonely plate on the counter and sighed, sleep-soaked and entirely unready to face the day. Her father cleared his throat and suggested they go out for breakfast instead, now that it was clear his own was not going to merit any kind of impressed response.

“I don’t want to go anywhere, Dad. Did you get any sleep? Or did you and Jane pull an all-nighter?” Darcy asked, allowing a hint of bitterness to seep into her voice.

Tony cleared his throat, “Yeah, I got a few hours. Look, I shouldn’t have left you up here. I guess my rescue didn’t exactly go as planned and… I was worried and then you were okay. I just didn’t know what to do after that, so I let myself get distracted.”

Darcy took a deep breath. Jane getting her dad’s spotlight was only a symptom of the laissez-faire attitude Tony had to Darcy. He had always been afraid of doing her wrong, but often chose inaction over control or dictation.

“I’m sorry. I panicked,” Tony said, “a lot. You know, one morning I got woken up and my Mom and Dad weren’t there anymore. And you called and I just… I couldn’t let the same thing happen to my baby girl. Even if I don’t deserve her.

“And that Cap comment was out of line and, frankly, gross to even think about, I’m sorry for that too,” he continued, grimacing at the thought of it.

“Okay, I promise that if I ever do get the chance to be Captain America’s side ho, you’ll hear all about it, Dad,” Darcy teased.

“Ack. I know I would deserve it but please, no. Yeurgh.”

Darcy smiled a little, for the first time in what felt like a full twenty-four hours.

“So… are we okay?” Tony asked, laying on the puppy dog eyes.

They had a long way to go, really, for them both to include each other in their lives the way they wanted. But for now, “yeah, we’re okay.”

Before she could second-guess herself, Darcy flung her arms around her father’s waist and hoped to get the most out of a hug before it became weird and awkward. But instead of the usual stilted pat on the back she normally received, Tony hugged her back and pressed a small kiss to her temple.

“Better without the suit, huh?” Tony asked, fondly. Darcy hummed happily in response and relaxed in her father’s arms. But it occurred to her that there was something distinctly missing. She drew back in confusion and placed her hand flat against her father’s chest where there was… no arc reactor. No hard metal, no humming of generated power.

“Uh… yeah… about that…”

Tony explained in a rather strained voice, anticipating the resultant shock and shouting, about his decision to finally have the shrapnel removed. He emphasized the professionalism of the surgeons and the fancy, expensiveness of the hospital. But it achieved little and the first thing Pepper and Steve heard as they walked through the front door was still Darcy’s indignant shrieking, _“No biggie?! Oh yeah, by the way, I had major fucking heart surgery! Oh my god!”_

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Ready, Set, Don't Go](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6463837) by [McGregorsWench](https://archiveofourown.org/users/McGregorsWench/pseuds/McGregorsWench)
  * [Tony Stark and the Dead Dove](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6718723) by [Nemhaine42](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nemhaine42/pseuds/Nemhaine42)




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